Alassane Ouattara's Forces Nouvelle look set to replace Laurent Gbagbo's "National Armed Forces" as the "government" army. No one is saying this (because everyone is officially supposed to support Ouattara), but it is likely his current martial success is built on the direct intervention of Blaise Campaore, President of Burkina Faso. Indeed, some of the "Ivoiriens" in Ouattara's triumphant army are likely officers and regular enlisted soldiers from the Burkinabe Armed Forces. Both sides are reportedly using Liberian mercenaries. Unsurprisingly, there are reports of atrocities by both the "government" and "rebel" armies.
Some think this is the end-game of the Ivoirien crisis, but such thoughts have been uttered before.
Nearly two decades ago, the autocratic Felix Houphouet-Boigny died.
In Houphouet's final years, his Prime Minister, Alassane Ouattara, was the de facto "Acting President", but according to law the Presidency was meant to pass to the President of the Ivoirien National Assembly, Henri Konan Bedie. Rather than step aside for Bedie to take the office, Prime Minister Ouattara attempted to use his de facto control of the powers of the presidency to subvert the transition and to consolidate power in his own hands. After a political mini-crisis, Ouattara's efforts failed, and he went into exile when Henri Konan Bedie was confirmed as president.
Gaining the presidency and forcing his rival into exile were not enough for Bedie, who decided to make it constitutionally impossible for his rival Ouattara to be a political threat. Bedie inaugurating the an ideology he called "Ivoirite" and passed laws he argued were necessary to (for all intents and purposes) protect the political supremacy of pure-blood Ivoriens from perfidious "foreigners" in their midst. Bedie's definition of "foreigner" was designed to apply to Alassane Ouattara, to invalidate his citizenship and disqualify him from running for political office. That was bad enough to begin with, but any law written to use the facts of Ouattara's life to invalidate his citizenship was bound to have the effect of invalidating the citizenship of millions of Ivoiriens in the north of the country, whether intentionally or not.
This sparked a bigger crisis, and when Bedie realized he could count on the support of General Robert Guei, who had been appointed army chief by the late Houphouet-Boigny, in his fight with Ouattara, he sidelined Guei and went on to "win" an election that was boycotted by both Ouattara's and Gbagbo's parties. In response, General Guei overthrew President Bedie and held a quick election. Having tasted power, and desiring to keep it, Guei upheld Bedie's Ivoirite-derived laws barring Ouattara from participating in the elections. By all accounts, Guei then lost the election to Laurent Gbagbo, but nevertheless declared himself the winner. A civil uprising forced Guei from office, sending him into internal political exile. Laurent Gbagbo, who had spent the last decade-and-half of the Houphouet-Boigny autocracy campaigning for democracy (and who had won an election from which Guei had blocked Ouattara), became President.
Alas, Gbagbo too became a convert to "Ivoirite" ideology, as well as to Bedie's statutory sleight-of-hand that banned Ouattara from running for office. In response, a rebel army, backed by Ouattara and by Burkinabe President Blaise Campaore, swept the northern half of the Cote d'Ivoire before French and Senegalese troops intervened to force the incipient Civil War into a stalemate. In the opening stages of the war, ex-president General Robert Guei was murdered in mysterious circumstances.
International intervention had the effect only of freezing the frontline. A decade went by with no progress on any core issue. Eventually an election was held; the rebel army controlled the north and the government army the south, and each side rather blatantly rigged in its domain. The final results said Ouattara had won; the Gbagbo side rejected this. After more stalemate, war resumed; this time the French and the "United Nations" did not stop the rebel advance as they had done the first time, and as I type this Ouattara's forces have more or less overrun the entire country save a few parts of Abidjan.
Firstly, let me state clearly that the autocratic political tradition of modern Cote d'Ivoire is the root of the countries present-day difficulties. As with most other countries in Africa, modern Cote d'Ivoire was "amalgamated" by the French, who then imposed what was in effect a colonial dictatorship over the country. Independence in 1960 meant only that the dictatorial French colonial governor was replaced by the dictatorial Felix Houphouet-Boigny. The French colonial government did not allow citizens to choose their government democratically and tolerated no internal opposition; the Houphouet-Boigny regime was exactly the same. Both the French and Houphouet would defend their political dictatorships by arguing that they brought economic progress to the country.
Eventually Houphouet died.
Ouattara, Bedie and the late Robert Guei were all political scions of the autocratic Houphouet Era. All three of them understood that the way the system worked is if one man takes the presidency, that man holds it for life, exercises the powers of Augustus Caesar, and crushes any rivals without remorse. There was no such thing as letting someone else be president for a while and then taking your turn some time later (as is done in Tanzaniza, Mozambique, South Africa, Botswana and has been suggested in Nigeria).
The reason Ouattara initially tried to block the transition of power to Bedie is he wanted to be president and knew if he let Bedie have it, he would never get to be president. Unsurprisingly, when he was forced to let Bedie have it, Bedie did nothing other than come up with ways to make sure he kept it and Ouattara never got it. Then Robert Guei got in on the act, and eventually the biggest disappointment of all, Laurent Gbagbo, joined the train.
Gbagbo was supposed to be different. While Ouattara, Bedia and the late Guei had all profited (financially as well as politically) from aligning themselves over decades with the Houphouet-Boigny autocracy, Laurent Gbagbo had been the lone voice crying out for democracy for over a decade before Houphouet-Boigny's death. And he had suffered the consequences -- anyone who thinks Houphouet was a genial old man, need only read up on Houphouet's treatment of Gbagbo. But much like other long-term preachers of democracy in Africa, Gbagbo turned out to be every bit as much an autocrat as the man he reviled (Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade is another example of a long-time democracy campaigner who metamorphosed into a pseudo-monarchic autocrat when he finally attained office).
The important thing you should note is NONE of the Ivoirien rivals is or was a true believer in democracy and limited government. The Ivoirien Civil War is not about "democracy"; it is about which autocrat gets to inherit Houphouet's throne. If anything, the rivals' collective abhorrence of democracy is the CORE REASON the Cote d'Ivoire is at war with itself.
None of them can afford to allow a rival to occupy the office because they know that in so doing they would forever lose their chance to occupy it themselves. NONE of them believes that his rivals will allow for democratic elections; the contest for power of necessity thus takes undemocratic form. Under the prevailing political environment, the only way to take office is to SEIZE it ... and once you have it, to do anything, even criminal things, to keep it
And all power is concentrated in the Office of the President, which means it is the only office worth having and no one cares about the National Assembly (a meaningless institution) or the Regions (which exist only as administrative devices for the Presidency). No one is satisfied to control X number of Regional governments or to have X number of representatives in Parliament. You are either the president or you are nobody.
In a prior post, I voiced my opposition to the idea of using of Nigerian soldiers to assist or actualize any of the rivals' presidential ambitions. As a matter of principle and altruism, if we truly want to see what is best for our sub-regional neighbours, we would have advocated:
(a) placing both armies under the neutral command of West African officers seconded for the purpose; stores of arms and munitions would have to be independently located and placed under direct ECOMOG control -- only a gun and a handful of bullets would be assigned to soldiers in each army, and all would be restricted to territory they already occupied;
(b) establishing an interim, technocratic government, responsible to ECOWAS, to reestablish basic unified governance across the country in a pseudo-federal format. ECOWAS would control the national government, while elected regional assemblies are formed in the 19 regions. Unlike national-level politics, there is less scope for post-election gridlock at the Regional level. The ECOWAS-mandated national government could serve as a neutral political device through which the 19 regional governments work together to decide upon nationwide, pan-Ivoirien policy. The principal rivals, and any of their associated within defined degrees of relationship would be barred from serving in any of these governmental structures.
(c) In five years or so, elections to a National Assembly could hold under ECOWAS jurisdiction, but not to the Executive, which would still be controlled by ECOWAS. We could then begin a five-year process of seeing if the different political parties can work together to pass legislation (which the ECOWAS-mandated will have no power to block, unless it can show the legislation would have the effect of reignited Civil War-era tensions).
(d) If all goes well, elections for President would take place in 10 years, when the National Assembly is up for re-election.
(e) All of the warring parties would have to agree to it in total; ECOWAS would go in there peacefully to carry out the plan and not as a party to the war or to fight any side in the conflict.
I know what you are thinking. The plan above is unrealistic.
I know.
I agree.
It is unrealistic.
For one thing, it presumes an ECOWAS and member-nations that are much less useless than currently exists. Unfortunately, most countries in ECOWAS are in dire need of cleansing themselves, and as such have neither the inclination nor the means nor the imagination to conduct such an exercise in the Cote d'Ivoire.
For another, it assumes a Nigeria that is much more efficacious in its internal governance and external diplomacy. As it stands, we have neither the standing (morally or politically), nor the capacity (resource-wise or administratively), for any such intervention.
Finally it presumes that the rival parties in Cote d'Ivoire (and their armies) would voluntarily agree to a plan whose very intent is to sanitize the Ivoirien political system by removing them and their cohorts entirely from it. They are willing to waste their fellow citizens' lives for their ambitions; you can hardly expect them to give up those ambitions because you remind them that they have a responsibility to their people.
But as "unrealistic" as the plan may be, it is the only scenario in which the loss of the lives of Nigerian soldiers would be justified. None of the Ivoirien rivals is worth dying for -- they are individually and collectively not worth the many Ivoirien lives wasted over their rivalry -- nor is the success of any of the trio likely to result in anything of value to the West African sub-region or to the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Neo-Houphouetistes like Ouattara and Bedie would run the Cote d'Ivoire like an overseas department of France, with concomitant roadblocks to West African trade and cooperation, based on the ridiculously colo-mental notion of an "anglophone" and "francophone divide. Antipathy would be specifically aimed at Nigeria, a country neo-Houphouetistes have always treated as an existential threat to their preferred order of things.
Gbagbo's xenophoic tirades against the people of the northern half of his country make him unsuitable for the presidency in a sub-region comprised entirely of multi-ethnic, multi-relgious amalgamated countries. Like the rest of the Ivoirien political elite, Gbagbo too thinks of Nigeria as an existential threat.
And you have the unspoken-but-likely intervention of Burkina Faso's Blaise Campaore on the side of Alassane Ouattara. If there was a Kingdom of People in West Africa Who Hate Nigeria, Campaore would be their king. It was Campaore, along with Houphouet-Boigny and Moammar Ghaddafi, who principally backed Charles Taylor's NPFL and its offshoot, the RUF.
The case of Liberia and Sierra Leone is instructive for those who envision a more strategically cohesive foreign policy from Nigeria. The thing about us is we have a very weak conception of what constitutes our strategic interests in our sub-region or even worldwide. So when events start to go in a way that is opposite to our real interests, we barely notice, because we barely notice our real interests anyway. Things that could be nipped in the bud, stopped when they are still small (Taylor's initial army comprised 25 men) are allow to metastasize until they are so big that there is nothing we can do about it with our limited resources.
The economic and political relationship between Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire over the last 50 years has been rubbish from the perspective of either countries' strategic interests. The current Ivoirien Civil War will not result in any significant change to this state of affairs. Heads, we lose. Tails, we lose.
The Goodluck Jonathan administration will be looking for the "international community" to endorse its anticipated victory in the 2011 Elections, and so may be inclined to oblige them by recognizing the new Ouattara regime and helping to legitimize it (in part by joining everyone else to pretend it was only Gbagbo's forces who committed human rights violations and gross crimes against civilians). Ouattara will accept Jonathan's endorsement .... and then set about restoring Cote d'Ivoire as a French department.
I hate to see the Ivoirien people suffer. But I hate even more to REWARD the men who are the source of their suffering, and to retain the system of governance that gave rise to the suffering.
But what option is there? Nigeria, the so-called "Giant" is in no position to influence outcomes ... and even if we were, I bet you we would do the opposite to what is in our (and the Ivorien) interests.
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